Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the administration's failure in managing international relations effectively.
Henry A. Kissinger highlights the paradoxical situation of an administration that is equally at odds with both allies and adversaries, while also facing significant global upheaval. This situation reflects a notable decline in diplomatic relations and indicates a broader instability in the world order since World War II, emphasizing the complexities and challenges of modern governance.
In practice
In a political debate, one could use this quote to illustrate the failures of current foreign policy.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
Government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America.
The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a 'third force,' independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.
If the American people knew what we have done, they would string us up from the lamp posts.
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